I’ll be honest with you here: I never expected to write the
book that Tartaros turned out to be. When I wrote, I had no concept of what
urban fantasy was, or contemporary fantasy, or paranormal fiction. I was intent
on writing fantasy and sci-fi, and Tartaros seemed like fantasy when I wrote
it.
Then people started throwing all these other weird labels on
it. Things like ‘paranormal’ and ‘contemporary fantasy’ and ‘young adult.’
Nope, I hadn’t even considered that it might be YA (understand: I wrote this fresh
out of high school, so that thought didn’t occur to me). I just knew I had a
book, and it had demons.
That’s the one thing I could understand being in there,
really: I love demonology. I have since high school, when I first read the
Lesser Key of Solomon. And sure, the demons in Tartaros have almost nothing to
do with the actual Catholic demons, but it’s a subject that fascinated me.
But that’s still not what inspired me to write Tartaros. It
was a picture. A picture I’d taken a few months ago and hung on the door to my
bedroom. I passed by it for months and, for whatever reason, I looked at it and
this queer little thought popped into my head:
He would make a really good demon hunter.
Word for word. I remember it because it was so profoundly
out of left field. I had little reason to think he would make a better than
average demon hunter. He was fit. That’s about it. But something in there
resonated with me for some still unknown reason.
From there, the story spilled out. And I tried a million
ways to plan it. I wrote it out, scene by scene, on note cards…which I believe
I ended up throwing out. I tried to do an outline. I tried fitting it into a
novel planning form. Then I said screw it and just wrote a good story…and
apparently it worked.
Tartaros, out now through Prizm Books.
Excerpt:
Daniel rose to his feet
and stared at Yolanda. Light shone from her eyes and mouth. Her muscles pushed
against the skin. The blood from her cuts sizzled again as Daniel stared at her
arm. The three slashes he made were already replaced with tiny scars.
Her muscles continued to
bulge out. “Daniel?” Her voice, weak and scared, quivered from her throat. “Are
you there?”
He heard sudden cracks
coming from her body and saw her legs bend forward. Bits of bone fell from her
shattered knees and floated around her. He rushed at her, but when he made
contact, an electric pain raced up his arm. He flew back to the opposite wall
and crashed into the window, sending glass shrapnel across the floor. He
watched her body curl and tighten into a ball.
Rathbone crawled through
the broken glass and threw a bottle into the fray. It shattered before it hit
her and the contents, whatever they were, swirled around with the bone
fragments. Yolanda’s blood crashed to the floor next and splashed into the
whirling sphere in turn. Daniel couldn’t move, couldn’t even cry for terror.
Panic paralyzed him as he looked on.
Yolanda’s form obscured
behind the thin veil of blood and bone, soon disappearing all together. When he
could finally move, Daniel dragged himself across the floor, pangs of agony
sliding through him with every bit of glass that cut his body. He reached up to
the ball of blood and pushed his hand through. A beam of light shot out of the
puncture and bounced around the walls. He fell back to the floor as more light
washed over his body. The sphere broke apart and blood spattered around the
room, filling up the carved runes with bright red.
Then everything went blank and Daniel felt nothing
~~~~~~~
Twitter: @VossFoster
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Blog tour schedule:
And, remember, there's also a giveaway. One lucky commenter from this tour will win a free copy of Tartaros. Just leave your eMail in the comments!
Voss
